Installation Instructions Installing the Decimal Games for PC Playing the Decimal Games Authors Installing the Decimal Games for PC Please note that the Decimal Games work only on PCs not on Macs. They are intended as a supplement and may not work on all PC environments. They have been tested on a range of PCs but there is no guarantee they will work on yours if you have a different configuration of your computer to those tested. The games must first be installed on your computer to work. Please follow the instructions below. The Decimal Games are provided as an optional extra on this CD-ROM. They rely on having suitable system files on your computer. The authors do not guarantee that they will work on all computers, and cannot provide technical help beyond these instructions. We hope your students can enjoy them. Five of the games are included in one system (DecSys). The instructions for installing and using this system are given below. There are two further games that are not included in the DecSys package. They are Flying Photographer - Flexible Version and DecimalLine. Instructions for installing Flying Photographer - Flexible Version. Instructions for using DecimalLine. Instructions for installing the Decimal Games system (DecSys – five games). Open the Decimal Games folder on the CD-ROM. To do this, go to "My Computer" and then right click on the CD icon and then open. Copy the folder DecSys onto your computer. Inside the copied folder, double click on "setup" and allow this to ‘run'. Unless you change the directory for installation, the program will be installed under Program Files/DecSys. To use the game, just go to Start menu, Programs and DecSys. Some systems will not have all required files available. For example, you may be missing richtx32.ocx. Search for such files on the internet, download and follow instructions to place in the appropriate folder on your computer. The games will ask for a username and password. These can be made up by users. If you want the system to track progress from one playing occasion to another, then you must use the same password both times. It is only the password that matters. Top Playing the Decimal Games Go to the Start menu, then to Programs and then to Decsys. The games open automatically. Students need to enter their name and password. The adaptive tutorial system uses the PASSWORD to track individual students, so it is important that students using the system seriously should always use the same password. You can make up any username and password. Each of the games can be accessed from the main screen and can be played in any order; however we recommend that players first try the Decimal Comparison Test (DCT). This will come up first for new users. The games have brief instructions on the front screen. Some games have settings that can be altered by the teacher (e.g. the speed of the aeroplane in Flying Photographer. If a student is making mistakes, help will appear in subsequent items. In Flying Photographer, the help is a partial numbering of the numberline. In Hidden Number, the help gradually constructs two lines with lengths equal to the sizes of the numbers, so that their sizes can be compared. At every stage, the length of the line shown corresponds to the part of the decimal number that has been exposed. In DecimAliens, students can click on the red buttons and see the value of each digit in many different forms. Games can be played in any order and you can quit at any time. The adaptive tutoring system keeps track of whatever questions the students have answered; the diagnosis gets better if it has more information. It is also tracking what a student is learning. The button on the lower right hand corner shows a record of the students' answers. All of the answers of every student are stored in a file called "output.txt", which is created by the program in the same folder as the original game files. To keep this manageable, its contents should be deleted occasionally, or saved under another name in order to keep records. You can use the games to diagnose students' understanding of decimals and to see if they have learned after they play the games, or after teaching. A student whom the computer thinks has full understanding is called an "apparent expert" (ATE in the Bayesian net, visible in the task bar). There is a button on the front page (lower right hand corner) titled Task Sequencing that allows the teacher to change the order in which students confront difficult items in the games. "Encouragement" means that the computer tries to offer items that the student will answer correctly, followed by items that are harder. "Challenge" means that the computer tries to offer items that the student will get wrong, followed by items that are easier. "Mixed" means that the computer tries to offer alternatively easy and hard items. This button can be changed at any time. On your screen, the game windows may seem very small – this is to cater for many different screen resolutions. Fewer pixels on the screen make them bigger. Similarly, your aeroplane may fly to fast or too slow – use the buttons in the game to adjust its speed. The Number Between game is set to use numbers in the range of 0 to 1 i.e. [0,1]. However, it can easily be set to work on other ranges for students with other learning needs. For example, students learning about whole numbers could use [0, 200], students learning about negative numbers could use [-10, 10] and [7, 8] is a different but useful range for decimal numbers. To do this, you need to open the textfile NBInput.txt. Do this by clicking on the Windows Start menu and selecting "run" and typing "C:\Program Files\DecSys\NBInput.txt" (no inverted commas) into the box. If you have used a standard installation, the file will open when you press return. Otherwise use "search" facility. Replace 0 by the lower limit of your new interval, and on the next line, replace 1 by the upper limit of your new interval. Save the file. Remember to change it back when you are finished. Top Authors Contact author Professor Kaye Stacey Melbourne Graduate School of Education The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA Main programmer and Bayesian net designer Tali Boneh Research team Professor Liz Sonenberg, University of Melbourne Department of Information Systems Dr Ann Nicholson, School of Software Engineering and Computer Science, Monash University Tali Boneh, University of Melbourne and Monash University Dr Vicki Steinle, University of Melbourne Game programmers Tali Boneh, Nick Nethercote, Alywn Ngai University of Melbourne students conducting associated research: Caroline Condon, Shona Archer, Daren Lightfoot, Calvin Tromp, Jenny Flynn, Sally Helm, Elise Dettman. Top